MAC-Layer Protocol for TCP Fairness in Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, the authors study the interactions of TCP and IEEE 802.11 MAC in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). They use a Markov chain to capture the behavior of TCP sessions, particularly the impact on network throughput performance due to the effect of queue utilization and packet relaying. A closed form solution is derived to numerically determine the throughput. Based on the developed model, they propose a distributed MAC protocol to alleviate the unfairness problem in WMNs.